Next opportunity for Board approval comes in April.
We now know that ICANN’s Board will not vote on approving the new top level domain name applicant guidebook at its March meeting in San Francisco.
But will the delay be just one month?
ICANN’s Board of Directors will meet again on April 21 for a “Special Meeting of the ICANN Board of Directors”.
Given that ICANN will have its bylaws-defined consultation with the Governmental Advisory Committee during its March meeting, it seems reasonable that one month later everything will be wrapped up.
Then again, as people frequently point out, no one has ever lost money betting against approval.
If new TLDs get the green light in April then you can expect the application window to open up in the fall, and the first new TLDs to come on line either late 2012 or early 2013.
But I’m not placing any bets on that.
Jon says
This whole new TLDs thing will be a complete bust. Even if they are approved, nobody will make any money on them. Companies applying for new TLDs will lose the most, so they better hope they are never approved. Wonder how much money ICM Registry, Minds + Machines, and the likes wasted already on something that will either never happen, or will waste them even more money if it does.
steve says
I hope not.
They should have 10 new tld’s and based on applications figure out which 10 are the best.
Personally 0 is the right number for me.
Lets have .car , .cars, .auto, .autos, etc… stupid
Kevin Murphy says
I think you’re thinking along the right lines Andrew.
It’s also possible that the board could convene a meeting at any time and “waive notice”, whatever that means, as they have a few times recently.
Jothan Frakes says
@jon – in 1985 it was a fight to introduce new top level domains…. people said the same thing in opposition of adding generic top level domains to the root like .com – naysayers are not always right, obviously.
Jp says
No
Whenever they do get approved I expect it will be at a somewhat unexpected time.
Jacob Williams says
Many people around me feel that ICANN will wait to approve the final guidebook/process at a board meeting during an ICANN meeting (June). I feel that April’s board meeting is plausible, but I guess we’ll have to see how the GAC/Board meeting goes on 2/28 – 3/1.
DASHWORLDS says
Re Top Comment on TLDs that: “nobody will make any money”
It’s not just about well placed corporations trying to make money on TLDs. What about end users?
There are other issues to consider such as memorability. Yes .COM is popular, but how many of the over 90 million dotcoms can/does the average man in the street remember – maybe 5 or 10 (including Google, Yahoo Twitter and Facebook).
Making the Internet one huge phone book means that name relevancy, memorability are now more crucial than ever. Internet users need to be allowed to find a way of being unique.